On Fri, 2013-02-01 at 16:13 -0600, Mitch Hayenga wrote: > Hi all, > > My advisor is teaching our graduate parallel computer architecture class > this semester and he has a ton of students (40+ I think). Given so many > students, he is trying to find additional ideas for those students who > can't come up with project ideas on their own. Often we try to make the > student project results useful beyond the class. So I was wondering if any > of the gem5-devs knew of places where they would like to see gem5 > improvement, but the given task is too time consuming given their other > tasks/objectives. These tasks should be able to be tied in with the > learning that should occur in a grad comp arch class. > > Here are some I've come up with: > > 1) SE TLB latency modeling > TLBs lookups in SE mode respond immediately. Modify this behavior to > properly model lookup latency. A simple class project could be doing this > in addition to trying to make/model TLB prefetchers, but the main benefit > would be SE TLB latency modeling. > > 2) Gem5 Classic Coherence > Modify the coherence protocol in gem5-classic to behave more as you would > expect a MOESI protocol to. I've posted myself on this previously ( > http://www.mail-archive.com/gem5-users@gem5.org/msg01021.html). They could > also try to extend the protocol. > > 3) Extended prefetchers > Add more complicated/intelligent prefetchers to gem5. > > 4) Loop buffer modeling/prediction in O3 > > > Any other places where a minor issue exists, you lack the time to fix it, > and you think it could make a good parallel computer architecture class > project?
Something I'd like someone to look into is support for cache flushing instructions. A nice first step would be to implement it using the code used for the functional interface (memWriteback & memInvalidate). This would allow us to remove some hacks used to get Linux booting without working cache flush instructions. I'm not sure if it is a great class project though. //Andreas _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list gem5-dev@gem5.org http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
